BlackBerry 10 is known to be one of the most open platforms out there right now. The Native SDK is available for all three operating systems, including GNU/Linux. I’m one of the GNU/Linux fans; Linux had introduced me to the world of UNIX and POSIX. Because QNX is POSIX-compliant, the development tools play well with the Linux environment.

Linux installation varies from computer to computer; there will be some differences in experience when installing BlackBerry 10 SDK. I will highlight some of these differences below and guide you through to make your Linux box a full-fledged BlackBerry 10 Native Development Workstation.

The Linux I am using is Ubuntu Linux 12.10 64-bit. I use the 64-bit distro because it’s the distro with a few issues needing to be resolved before the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK can be used. Furthermore, it’s also the system I use as the build server for my personal projects.

Let’s start with the first potential issue:

Issue #1: Cannot connect to device

BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha uses TCP/IP over USB to communicate with the host computer (i.e. your computer). However, sometimes it doesn’t work. If you face this problem, you need to set your handset as Windows Connection manually.

To test if the connection is running well, ping the IP address of the device while in development mode.

Issue #2: Cannot run the Native SDK Linux installer

The installer of BlackBerry 10 is built in a Java platform that runs in 32-bit infrastructure; it uses 32-bit GNU Standard C and C++ library, which isn’t installed in 64-bit Linux by default. Therefore, it will say something like “cannot find /path/to/tmp/java”. If you try to find it, it’s there. The error happens because the 32-bit Java runtime can’t be executed; the 32-bit libraries are missing. So we need to install it first. To do that, use apt-get or aptitude command:

$ sudo aptitude install libc6:i386 libstdc++6:i386

After that, execute the installer. Don’t forget to make the installer executable after download:

Issue #3: Cannot run Momentics

Momentics is the name of the IDE to create Native Apps on BlackBerry 10. It’s also built on Eclipse on 32-bit Java Platform. The installer embeds the runtime to the NDK. However, some libraries are missing so it can’t be started. It turns out that it needs 32-bit X11 and GTK+Pango libraries. So we need to install it to be able to run the Momentics IDE.

Inside BlackBerry Developers

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